I was surprised to see last week’s New Yorker, the Style Special, for a couple of reasons. First it was poly-bagged with a supplement called “Fashion Rocks” (more about this in a moment), and second, because it contains what I first thought to be one of the bigger flubs in New Yorker history.
Considering that New Yorker errors usually run to about two typos per year (“emnity” is the only one I’ve spotted in 2005), and a marginal dangler or two in a Lemann rush-job commentary, this one seemed a doozy. Pages 155 to 162 were published twice. Once where they belong, and again in the middle of the book, replacing pages 81-91.
Now, I don’t usually notice the pagination in itself, but it seemed odd to me that they’d suddenly plopped Nancy Franklin and David Denby into the feature well, along with the Postal Service boilerplate. I knew the jig was up when I saw the backpage caption contest in the middle of the book, and it was the same one that appeared at the back of the book. Editors hate when this happens. The sympathetic nausea set in. Being experienced in these kinds of capers, I eventually figured out that the error eliminated Shouts & Murmurs and the first couple pages of Peter Hessler’s letter from China. Knowing how we writers and editors all idolize the New Yorker, I felt especially bad for Paul Rudnick, who doesn’t get that many stabs at the humor page.
I asked David Remnick about this, and it was apparently the first he’d heard about it. I asked around here, and so far, I seem to have the only mixed-up copy, so that is a sympathetic relief. Here I was prepared to offer the cynical explanation that these special theme issues are so easy to set aside that no one but a truly pathetic magazine geek would notice. (Is your copy FUBAR? Let me know.)
This is no reflection on the quality of theme issues, per se. I just think it’s human nature to reject products that are overpackaged. There are huge sections of wonderful magazines and newspapers that I do not read, simply because I am annoyed to have to machete the cane breaks that tell me I’m about to wade into the “Arts Feature” or the “the World of Michael Musto” or a “Special Advertising Section on Head Trauma,” or whatever. Surprise me.
Other than the lingering influence of Tina Brown’s evanescent moment, it is not entirely clear to me why the New Yorker still publishes a dozen or so special issues per year. The fiction specials make a certain amount of sense, but beyond that–travel, food, style–they begin to devolve into mannered exercises in grouping vaguely related content, I suppose for the benefit of advertisers. We experience that kind of pressure around here all the time; salons and spas wish to buy ads in our special salons and spas issue, or our special salons and spas section. Can we please fax over our editorial calendar? And when we tell them we don’t have that sort of thing, they seem confused and concerned. (We believe they have been brainwashed by certain low-rent publications that are always promising to write about them if they purchase advertising.) It would be a useful tool for advertisers, I suppose, to know if we are planning any editorial content that would make their advertisments look especially good. But we don’t like to run a magazine just to satisfy advertisers, because that is inevitably insulting to readers, who begin to feel like a third wheel. The larger irony in my mind is this: Why do advertisers wish to congregate with their direct competitors in special issues and special sections? The whole point of advertising at this late date is to cultivate a remarkable, unique, “big bang” brand in an overcrowded media marketplace. Contrast. Juxtaposition. Innit?
I have not noticed a major inflow of advertising in the New Yorker’s special issues. Depending on how you count, and whether your issue is paginated correctly, this number is large enough to be perfect bound, but not exactly a bag-buster. But look at this: The sixty-page “Fashion Rocks,” an unpaginated glossy stand-alone that appears to have been seeded by Citi bank.
I have the habit of looking at magazines backwards, from the back cover in, and as I browsed the separate supplement, I had two thoughts–this could not possibly have been put together by New Yorker staff. Two, it looks and reads like a Rolling Stone feature well from about 1998, featuring one-on-one style-related interviews with rock stars like David Bowie, Gwen Stefanie, Nelly, Duran Duran (Duran! Duran! My god) and so on. Indeed, I haven’t seen such a relentlessly sycophantic and ephemeral group of soft-focus celbrity “profiles” for almost a decade, having thought the glossy form died long ago and was buried in the local newspaper.
Great moments in music journalism revisited (and these are just the leads:
“It is midday on a bright, blazing Thursday in July, but it’s dark inside this cavernous pool hall outside New Orleans… this broken down address is not where you would expect to find the five relatively cheerful, well-tailored members of Duran Duran.”
“‘I love makeover shows,’ says Beyonce Knowles.”
“Cornell Haynes Jr. is a lover not a fighter.” [That’s Nelly, you know.]
“When Joss Stone landed a record deal at the age of 14, she made one thing clear to the label brass: The clothes stay on.”
A quick glance at the masthead–have to admit it is surprising anyone would actually want to take the blame for this unfortunate enterprise–reveals that
a lot of people are either calling in favors or working on a third mortgage. It is like a time machine back to The Nineties at Wenner Media. The buck stops at the top of the masthead with Bob Love, the longtime, genteel, but aged editor of Rolling Stone who was displaced by rampant Ladism, but it passes through the hands of a kind of Love Boat cast of nineties “rock journalists” who specialized in the longform kissup–Jancee Dunn, Danyel Smith, David Wild, and so on. I have nothing against any of these people personally (indeed, I composed a few real stinkers myself back when), but the exposure is frigidly dated, and calls to mind an old adage: Never do anything just for the money. Also: You’re only as good as your last byline. Also: Script faces and faux xerox faces went out of style about six years ago, and do not yet qualify as kitsch. (Okay, now I’m being mean.)
In fact, the Fashion Rocks supplement to The New Yorker shows so little actual substance or style that it cannot possibly have passed over the desk of any editors at the New Yorker, and I wonder whether the publishing side even got a peek at it. Perhaps it is so bad because its chosen parameters–rock stars who wear or sell or talk about their own fashion lines–are inherently lame. It strikes me that the relevance of, say, P. Diddy and Scott Stapp and Boy George to the sartorial world is inversely proportional to their relevance in the music world. In other words– diversify your brand while you can, rock star and rock writer. There are advertising supplements waiting for you.
True, I am such a hopeless and idealistic magazine dork that part of me believes this messed up issue of The New Yorker will somehow be collectible, like a mis-struck coin from the mint, or a Dewey Defeats Truman headline–if only I hadn’t torn into the polybag and forever devalued it. That Fashion Rocks supplement, though. Unfortunately, due to the high gloss and clay content, I can’t even use it for fish wrap. But I may keep it around anyway, as a sort of professional warning, or an idol to mammon.
P.S. If your copy of the September 26 issue was screwy, before you sell it on e-baylet me know, and I’ll pass along the info to Remnick. They’ll probably be glad to know what the exact damage may be.
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